DDL on 6/8/2009 at 14:12

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From a straight up scientific perspective, the idea of "a mystical force outside the realms of our understanding, yet that is capable of ..influencing our perceived reality somehow", isn't really a problem at all, as long as such influences are so carefully made, and so infrequently made, as to be indistinguishable from statistical noise. In other words, a framework which was created by and controlled by a god is a perfectly acceptable thing as long as it is indistinguishable from one that arose spontaneously through random chance. Essentially because it then becomes irrelevant to make the distinction. "God may or may not have done X, but either way X happened, and there are strong logical, testable reasons why X could've happened spontaneously."

Because as long as we can file "influence of god" away as either 'non existant' or a the very least 'indistinguishable from noise', we can get on with scientific discovery. If we need to factor in the whims of a supreme being, effectively science becomes impossible. You can't make hypotheses based on second-guessing a deity. "This experiment was unsuccessful BECAUSE GOD SAYS NO" is not a valid scientific conclusion (though IS admittedly probably something that's been written in a lab book at some stage).


So yeah: if I were put on the spot I would say that really, as long as god can safely be considered irrelevant, I don't care whether it exists or not.


(I'm trying to think if I've ever read a sci-fi story where humans get good enough at meta-analysis to actually start detecting influence of god or not.. If not, someone should write one. And have god turn out to have created the universe for penguins or something)


As for herr_garret's stuff..what?



Linkz plz! A+B = God? Or what?




Why does one finite thing automatically assume infinity? Christ, as far as we can tell the universe had a de facto BEGINNING, which either means it has the potential for an end (and is thus non infinite) or that infinite things can have a fixed start point (in which case finite beings creating infinite things is logically possible).

You seem to be conflating "nothing" with "infinity", which outside of some smug mathematical proofs is not really valid. Essentially assuming that outside of everything known is some sort of magical infinity, which thus must be god. Or something.

It could just be..fuck all, you know? No space, no time, no ANYTHING. In fact, not so much "there is nothing beyond the universe" but "there is no such thing as anything beyond the universe". A null concept, rather than infinity.

I'm just not sure making blanket statements and stamping LOGICAL on them is a valid argument, here.

Shakey-Lo on 6/8/2009 at 16:28

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I'm sure I remember reading about a PC RPG around ~10 years ago which was based in a world where science had proven the existence of God. I know nothing about it beyond that and it's always been something that has bugged me because I always bring it up (as an interesting premise) but have never managed to track the game down.

Beleg Cúthalion on 6/8/2009 at 18:27

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No, unless they lied big time they were all "real".

My last contribution to this discussions before we all get into drawing paradise cartoons: Wasn't the whole bunch of "scientific" results not also merely based on observation and testing and thus not 100% reliable (in terms of that we cannot assume they're completely correct, at least on a theoretical level)? I believe I saw some articles about limits of science and all that but I cannot remember anything tangible right now.

heywood on 6/8/2009 at 20:44

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Mathematics gives us a self-consistent, logic-based conceptual framework in which we can postulate and describe objects which we cannot observe. One of your assertions was (or at least the way I interpreted it was) that it's impossible to think about things which may exist beyond our ability to observe them with our own senses. I contend that mathematics is an example of how to think about those things in a meaningful way.

And we can support assertions about 4-dimensional objects from 3-dimensional observations. For example, general relativity. This is a very well supported theory. We cannot directly observe the curvature of spacetime or visualize it in 3 dimensions. But we can postulate it, gather evidence of it, measure it, and make verifiable predictions based on it.



I really can't follow your argument here. Thoughts are not necessarily tied to the senses. I think about lots of things every day without imagining pictures, sounds, smells, etc. In fact, that's basically what I do for a living. It sounds like you're saying that if we can't picture something in our minds (i.e. imagining to observe it), we cannot think meaningfully about it. But I can't believe that's what you actually mean.



The Penrose triangle a perfect example. You asked who can define the characteristics of something unobservable and outside the universe. Penrose did! A Penrose triangle has specific, defined characteristics that preclude its existence in our space, but it can exist in certain other 3-dimensional manifolds. If Penrose's thoughts were constrained in the manner you suggest, it should have been impossible for him to think of this object, define its characteristics, and identify the geometries it could exist in. Yet he did.

Now, if you want to dismiss the Penrose triangle as meaningless, let's go back to the Big Bang example. Just as it's impossible to properly visualize a Penrose triangle, it's also impossible to properly visualize the Big Bang. That's because the Big Bang, as it is theorized, is not an explosion of matter into space, but an expansion of space. That is not something that anyone can picture correctly, yet the theory is widely accepted and we have gathered evidence of it. Like a lot of our best theories, it arose from thought experiments.

I think that our primary disagreement is whether it is meaningful to think about things that we can't observe. I think that going by your standard, almost every branch of science could have been dismissed as nonsense or mysticism when starting out. Your arguments could be used to reject theoretical physics and philosophy just as readily as theology. One thing we probably agree on is that it's not appropriate to claim knowledge of things that are currently unexplainable, or to speculate too far beyond what we have evidence for. Or to put it another way, it's a bad thing when the theorists get too far ahead of the empiricists.

Bringing this back to God, my point was that thinking about God doesn't necessarily mean thinking about some humanoid being exercising magical powers. That interpretation of God is way too narrow. God means different things to different people: a grand puppet master, an extra-dimensional being that initiated the big bang, a Star Wars like 'force', or just nature itself. The best I can come up with in the abstract is that God is the metaphor or placeholder people use to provide reasons for the things they can't explain.

This is why I find theist and atheist arguments to be equally unsatisfying. In order to reject the God hypothesis, an atheist first has to define God. And by defining God for the purposes of argument, he/she is de facto accepting one particular interpretation of God as the valid one, out of a potentially infinite number. The result is not really an atheist argument.

I guess I'm saying that it's mostly pointless to argue about existence. The more important issue is the role of God in people's lives and decision making.

mol on 6/8/2009 at 20:56

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Not to worry.

There is no hell.